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Flags courtesy of this site
Do French people wish each other a Joyeaux Bastille Day? I don’t know, but today is that day, the day that Parisian citizens stormed the Bastille, a prison and a fortress, captured the weapons stored there, and began the French Revolution. Ever since a few days before the Fourth of July, I have been reading several books that illuminate the French/American connection and the revolutions that made those two countries what they are today.

1. Great Improvisations: Franklin, France, and Birth of America by Stacy Schiff. I’m still not through with this one. Although it won a Pulkitzer Prize, I find the level of detail in this book a little more than I can take except in small doses. Still, it’s fascinating to see how human Benjamin Franklin and the other American revolutionaries were, how it was only by God’s grace that we were able to gain our independence from England. It was just as touch and go as Iraq is today. We could easily have been forced to make peace with the British on their terms–or been forced into an unfavorable alliance with France that made us practically French vassals. Although Schiff never mentions the hand of God in all the diplomacy that Franklin and John Adams carried on in France, I see it clearly. The founding of this country truly was a miracle, due to God’s mercy and the prayers of many Christians who lived in the colonies at the time. I do not believe in the demonstrably false idea that all our Founding Fathers were Christians (Franklin was certainly unorthodox, to say the least), but many were committed Christians and praying men.

2. Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini. Sabatini tells a good story set during the French Revolution; it reminds me of Star Wars, the “Luke, I am your father” motif. Why are young adventurers in swashbucklers always looking for their missing fathers?

3. The Glorious Cause: A Novel of the American Revolution by Jeff Shaara. I’m starting this one tonight. It’s fiction that covers the same time period as Great Improvisations.